Gennady Golovkin is a fighter at the very height of his powers. Those powers are so overwhelming that it is reasonable to speculate that only a handful of men in any weight class possess comparable levels of mastery. This is odd, since Gennady Golovkin is far less famous among casual fans than quite a few fighters inferior to him. That won't be true for much longer. Golovkin is a force so overwhelming that he hardly needs to prove himself any more. It is up to the rest of boxing to prove that it can stop him.

There is nothing shameful about being inferior to Golovkin. It is safe to say that as of the present moment, every middleweight in the world is inferior to Golovkin. In order to find a fighter who might have a fair chance of winning a fight against him, it's necessary to look down a weight class, to Floyd Mayweather, or up a weight class, to Andre Ward. They are the two very best pound-for-pound fighters in the world, and each of them has a far more star-studded résumé than Golovkin does. But that is the level at which the puncher from Kazakhstan is destined to find his real challenges in the sport. He is ready for that level of fight right now. He just needs to climb a few more steps up the ladder of contenders to prove it to the paying public.